


home (a thing I've never had)

by Kaylin881



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Angst with a Happy Ending, Foster Kid Keith (Voltron), Gen, Keith (Voltron)-centric, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Keith (Voltron), also they're all British in this one, will feature the other paladins in later chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25636480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaylin881/pseuds/Kaylin881
Summary: "It was addressed to him, in loopy green handwriting it took Keith a moment or two to decipher.Keith Kogane, The Smallest Bedroom, and then his foster family’s address. He blinked at the envelope, and it didn’t go away or start making sense."Or, in which Keith goes to Hogwarts.
Relationships: Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32





	home (a thing I've never had)

The summers were always the worst part of life as a foster kid.

In term time, Keith’s current set of foster parents were constrained by the need to have him presentable for school every weekday, and he was guaranteed a few hours free of their scrutiny five days out of seven. In the holidays, nothing limited them: there was nowhere he had to be, no-one who was expecting to see him. It wasn’t as though he had friends who might be worried about his absence.

As a result, Keith usually found himself spending the holidays shut in ‘his’ room, which in this house was a poky little box just barely big enough to meet the minimum standard that was ‘habitable’ according to social services. He was pretty sure it’d been a storage closet before the Dales decided, out of the goodness of their hearts, to share the warmth and generosity of their home with some poor troubled child.

The room had a bed, a closet about a quarter full of his clothes—mostly school uniforms—and around one square foot of bare floor covered with a short, scratchy carpet like the kind they used in school classrooms. According to Mrs Call-me-Polly Dale, it had been chosen because it didn’t show the dirt. Keith was pretty sure it was just that the Dales were cheap and didn’t care about giving nice things to their foster kids.

There was nothing else in the room, apart from Keith, and nothing to do but stare out of the window.

The door locked, but only from the outside, not that he’d have been allowed to lock himself in even if he could. He’d been labelled as ‘high risk’ a house or two back, and the label had stuck. He wasn’t allowed to handle knives, razors, or cigarette lighters, and he wasn’t meant to lock himself in a room on his own. Even when he went to the toilet, he was supposed to leave the door unlocked, in case he tried to drown himself in the bath or something. Keith ignored this rule whenever he could get away with it, which was any time he wasn’t expecting one of his foster parents to walk past the bathroom door. Seriously, he was eleven, not five. He wasn’t going to mistake the pills in the bathroom cabinet for sweets, or whatever else the social workers were worried about. Wasn’t anything he could do about the lock on the bedroom, though.

The one good thing about being locked in the room was that it meant he didn’t have to spend any more time than necessary around this set of foster parents. He got dizzy trying to keep up with the way they swung from sickly-sweet playacting at being his mum and dad to yelling and screaming whenever he crossed one of the invisible lines that were in slightly different places everywhere he lived. Keith had been moved eight times in the last four years, and learning the unspoken rules of each new house was like walking through a minefield every time. He’d been with this set since January—that made the third lot that’d kicked him out right after Christmas—and he was just starting to feel like he knew where all the mines were, which meant he was probably less than a month away from tripping one he hadn’t even known was there and getting kicked out again.

So, yeah, being in the room meant he couldn’t get into any more trouble than he was already in. That was the good part, the part that made up for the hunger twisting in his belly by the time they let him out to use the toilet and come down for supper.

Which was why, when his foster father barged into the room less than an hour after breakfast, red-faced and already opening his mouth to shout, Keith’s first reaction—alongside the panic—was a weird sense of betrayal. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was supposed to be _safe_ in the room, as much as anywhere was safe.

“What. Is. _This_?” Mr Dale was holding something in one hand. A piece of paper? No, an envelope, which he shoved in Keith’s face as though he was somehow responsible for it. The thing was, Keith was pretty sure he wasn’t, this time. He’d never seen the envelope before in his life.

It _was_ addressed to him, in loopy green handwriting it took Keith a moment or two to decipher. _Keith Kogane,_ _The Smallest Bedroom,_ and then his foster family’s address. He blinked at the envelope, and it didn’t go away or start making sense.

“Someone...sent me a letter?"

His foster father turned a deeper shade of red, edging into purple. “I’m not blind, boy!” he snapped. “And I’m not stupid, either.” He pointed with a shaking finger at the second line of the address, where it said ‘ _The Smallest Bedroom_ ’. “Is this a joke? You think this is funny?”

Keith shook his head, making a clump of black hair fall in front of his eyes. Mrs Dale would probably want to cut it all off again in a week or two. “No, sir.”

“Because I _don’t_ think it’s funny,” Mr Dale continued as if Keith hadn’t spoken. “And I don’t appreciate you wasting perfectly good paper and ink— _our_ paper and ink—on some childish practical joke!” He was ranting now, picking up momentum. Keith knew better than to interrupt, even though he desperately wanted to know what the letter said. He zoned out for a while and missed most of the next minute’s rant, something about ungratefulness and respect he’d heard a hundred times. It was the same story every time he ‘acted out’ in one of these places. The foster parents were shocked and appalled, they went on and on about how it had been so good of them to tolerate Keith living in their house and eating their food, and why couldn’t he be the perfect oh-so-grateful child they’d imagined when they signed the forms?

Instead of listening, Keith squinted at the envelope, trying to figure out what was strange about it. He had a niggling feeling that something wasn’t quite right for this to be an ordinary letter, quite apart from the strangeness of the address. He turned it over and over in his mind, picking over everything from the size and shape of the envelope to the bright green ink. He’d almost got it...

A meaty finger jabbed him hard in the centre of his chest.

“LISTEN TO ME WHEN I AM TALKING TO YOU!” Mr Dale had turned purple from the yelling,

“Yes, sir!” he yelped. No point trying to argue that he _had_ been listening, even if it had been true. It wasn’t smart to correct adults when they told you off for something. It only made them angrier, and Keith was starting to get worried that if Mr Dale got any angrier he was going to have a heart attack or something. Knowing his luck, Keith would end up with the blame.

“You are going to stay here,” his foster father ground out, “for the rest of the day. No dinner, and no. More. Pranks!” He nodded sharply, then turned on his heel and marched out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him.

Keith heard the key turn in the lock, and only then relaxed, flopping back onto the bed. It wasn’t fair. This room was supposed to be _safe_. Being in here was supposed to mean he couldn’t get in trouble, because there was no way for him to break the rules if he couldn’t _do_ anything. The strange letter had pulled that safety out from underneath him, and Keith hadn’t realised how much weight he’d been resting on it until it was gone.

The letter! Keith bolted upright. He thought he remembered...yes, it was! The envelope, with the address that had caused so much trouble, lay on the floor where Mr Dale had dropped it as he left. It was battered and creased where his foster father had crumpled it in his hand, but Keith flattened it back out and pulled out the paper inside.

Like the envelope, the letter was on thick, textured paper that screamed ‘expensive’. No wonder his foster parents were mad about Keith ‘wasting’ it. The writing was in the same green ink, handwritten like the address on the outside. Casting an anxious glance at the door, Keith spread the letter out flat against the floor and got down on his stomach to read it.

The first thing he noticed was the letterhead at the top. It said _Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry._ There was a proper coat of arms, with a shield divided into quarters and a Latin motto, but he was starting to see why Mr Dale thought this was a prank.

 _Dear Mr Kogane,_ the letter read. Even with his name on the outside, it took Keith a moment to realise that was meant to be him. No-one called him Mr Kogane. It didn’t even feel like his dad’s name like people always said in old movies: he’d been too young when his dad died to know him as anything other than ‘Daddy’.

The letter continued: _We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment._

_Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Minerva McGonagall_

_Deputy Headmistress_

That was it. He turned the paper over, just in case there was more on the other side, but it was blank. Not even a return address. At this point, the only thing stopping him from writing this off as a prank was that he couldn’t think of anyone who would come up with anything this elaborate just to prank _him_.

But...what else could it be?


End file.
